Yesterday, Americans across the nation voiced their opinion about the state of our Union and the direction we should be headed in record numbers.  In a competition where one candidate is a true American Hero, and the other candidate is a posterboy for the American Dream, there really are no losers.  Although my heart breaks that I will not get to witness a McCain presidency, and I am deeply saddened to see someone so deserving of the presidency be pushed aside, I am also proud of America for overcoming some of the racial and social barriers that have limited and divided our country for far too many years. 

So now is the time to swallow hard, then take one step forward.  We must leave this long, hard-fought battle behind us and approach tomorrow with the loyalty and support that our presidency deserves.  I refuse to repeat the sins of elections past with the snotty, divisive, and contemptuous bitterness that only serves to further fracture our already splintered society.  So, I face tomorrow with a quiet resolve that, although John McCain was my candidate, Barack Obama is my president, and I will do everything I can to make the next four years a success, for all of America - the red and the blue.

I encourage all of you to get involved with your respective parties, and reach out to your state and national representatives to communicate what matters most to you.  We are not required to merely choose from two parties that loosely represent our values - we are obligated to communicate those values so that they may help our government work better.  Democracy means more than casting a vote every couple of years - it means shaping our government to represent the values of its people. And that responsibility, my friends, sits squarely on the shoulders of each and every one of us.

Called Chicago boys: check out their article on Obama http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6380.html  Basically it shows his policies in action via examples of past failures.  I'm sure you investors know this but for y'all not familiar with this concept: the investing technology out there lets you check retroactively test your strategy.  Consider this blog a retroactive test of Obama's policies.  He fails.  The economist endorsed Obama - I think most economists are making a mistake.  Yes McCain's economic plans are way too deficit heavy but socialism-lite is not the answer.  Plus think of it this way: McCain isn't going to get to enact his policies - he is the check and balance.  I think he will keep the dems honest which will keep us more efficient than a submissive Obama.

Latest 9 entries on either Obama or McCain... (all the visible entries on the page) break 6-3 in favor of Obama.  What this means is that for every 2 deceitful attacks on Obama that they debunk they only do 1 for McCain.  I'll let y'all draw your own conclusions from that. 

African Americans in support of Obama.  97-2.  While the number was always higher than 80 post 1979, 97-2 is quite one sided.  Were Greek Americans 97-2 for Dukakis?  I think not.  Were Jewish Americans 97-2 in favor of Gore-Lieberman?  Not a chance.  But yet Blacks are universally opposed to McCain.

Let the record show that whites break 53-40 McCain. 

Republicans, we have a long way to go.  I'm optimistic that we can break the racial barrier one day.

http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html

Let me post this one so you'll be sure to read it.  BTW I got this from Amy Riedel:

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism.  You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere.  It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan?  It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups.  But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay?  They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it.  One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules.  The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans.  (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me.  It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here?  Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout?  Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal.  "Housing-gate," no doubt.  Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago.  So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President.  So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts.  This financial crisis was completely preventable.  The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party.  The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie.  Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What?  It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Franklin Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents.  Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link.  (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth.  That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans.  You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do.  Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences.  That's what honesty means .  That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one.  He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all?  Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women.  Who listens to NOW anymore?  We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late.  You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis.  You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.

/pat-on-the-back I posted the Thomas Sowell article earlier for y'all to read.  Apparently it struck a cord with the author too!

Obama vs his advisers on health care.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122488864905768469.html

The article sheds a little light on the gaping hole in McCain's plan though which is good.  Always nice to see the media be fair and balanced for once.

I have noticeably soured on Gov. Palin.  Forgive my earlier post gushing over her nomination - I simply had only known one side of her, her energy wonk side which I loved - and still do love.  Her social policies remind me of what I like to call the Baptist-Taliban.  Freedom means freedom for everyone.  Her statement today in support of a federal amendment banning gay marriage is absolutely inappropriate.  The government is not meant to be that big.  This reeks of big government and that is the enemy of freedom.  How dare she think that the government ought to regulate who consenting adults choose to marry.  Maybe we should make a federal amendment punishing unmarried pregnant mothers and force shot-gun weddings?  I think not.

To my R friends who want to shove their social policies down our throats: stop infringing upon our freedoms.  It is inherently UNCONSTITUTIONAL. I could go on... but I am not.  However, as a member of the Grass Root Republicans - and trying to modernize our party this kind of homophobic, hateful, dictatorial policy proposal sets us back.  How do you expect to win if you appeal to 20% of the population (my generation feels positive towards equality in choice in regards to marriage).  Big government is NOT the answer to social policy.

/end_rant

 

Let me address two of Obama's claims that are just plain false.

1) Obama alleges that independent organizations have claimed that he would provide three times more  middle class tax relief than McCain.  The report - which I blogged on earlier from the Tax Policy Center - said that without counting McCain's tax exemption for health-care Obama would provide three times more tax relief to the middle class.  However this isn't true for middle class families with children (remember McCain wants to double the child exemptions).  The statement is completely false if you count McCain's health-care tax credit which the Tax Policy Center didn't do and admitted that if you counted those credits that the results would be drastically different.
             The other deceptive problem with his statement is that Obama is ignoring his unintended consequences of raising taxes on small businesses, capital gains, wealthy individuals and entrepreneurs.  First of all, yes, taxes might go down for many people - but how many people would face an income loss as a result of his policies?  Economics 101 - all people pay all taxes.  You can't tax one group without hurting another in some way.  Think about it this way: two people are in a town.  One guy sells stuff on ebay the other guy runs a grocery store.  The guy who sells stuff on ebay makes 100 dollars, the one who runs the grocery store makes only 50 dollars.  The government decides to tax the "rich" guy and redistribute to the "poor guy".  So the government takes 25 of the rich guys dollars and spends 20 dollars on stuff for the poor guy.  Wait you might say - they taxed the rich guy 25 dollars.  The government is inefficient - they need 5 dollars to run themselves.  Now the grocery store guy gets 70 dollars and the ebay guy has 75 dollars.  Problem is now that the ebay guy is down 25 dollars and so he decides to cut back on his grocery store bill so he only spends 25 dollars instead of fifty... so what happens?  The grocery store owner is down to 45 dollars.  5 dollars less than what he started with before the redistributive process began.  Now this isn't always going to happen - but don't think this is uncommon.  When you take away income people spend in the economy and give it to the government you have a dead-weight loss.  Instead of the government people working and producing goods and services they only drain money from the pool.  Do they spend it too?  Yes, but they don't add their own production to the economy.  They redistribute money and take a commission, they don't actually do anything else. 

Real quick side note: As for the small business claim (Obama says he will lower taxes on 98% of small businesses or if he doesn’t lower their taxes he won’t raise ‘em.  98% of small businesses is a misleading number.  See 98% of small businesses generate only 50% of all small business income!  So the other 2% of small businesses that Obama will raise taxes on generate the other 50% of the small business income!  Think you are going to get a raise if your boss has to fork over more money to Uncle Sam?  I didn’t think so.

2) Obama claims that in regards to Health Care, "By the way, the average policy costs about $12,000. So if you've got $5,000 and it's going to cost you $12,000, that's a loss for you."  What a crock.  He's too smart to be this dumb.  This is just a misleading statement that he knows McCain won't be able to parry.  It might be 12,000 - though that figure is debated... but the 5,000 is nonsense.  It is 5,000 plus 12,000-taxes on the 12,000... let's think about it this way:  The median working family income makes $61,500 (rounding).  If we pretend that this family has no more income exemptions and won't receive anymore under McCain then if you add 12,000 to that number it becomes 73,500.  Now the first 3,601 of that money is taxed a rate of 15% so one would get to keep 3,060.85 of that money.  The next 8,399 dollars are taxed at a rate of 25%, so you get to keep 6,299.25 of that.  Now you add them together and get $9360.10.  On top of that 9,360 dollars you get a 5,000 tax credit so you get a total of $14,360.10...  What is more $14,360.10 or $12,000 dollars?  Obama is also assuming that the average cost of healthcare is going to stay at $12,000 dollars.  If you deregulate healthcare over state lines that cost could be considerably less...  Now the problem with McCain's plan is how he is going to deal with sick people who need care?  I have a few ideas about how to do this BUT... they are my ideas not his. Regardless though the 5,000 vrs 12,000 is total bull and yall need to know the real numbers.  McCain's plan has some serious problems but Obama's claim is too inaccurate and misleading for me to let it go... 

 

It never ceases to amaze me how, in the world of politics, what is good for the goose is a screaming outrage if done by the gander.  Well, Senator Biden better thank his lucky stars that the media are somehow favoring the pattern of his feathers to those of the fashionable Ms. Palin - had she muttered the blatant lies outlined in this WSJ article, they would have had her plucked and stuffed.

Read for yourself:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122325448093406451.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20080916/pl_bloomberg/ambsgo09sxvo

Obama and McCain, they'll fight for us right?  Smart regulations?  Yeah... w/e.  They have been bribed to the tune of 9.9 and 6.9 million dollars of donations (respectively). 

Change change in a pot, the more you believe it the more we rot!  Hmm my song writing skills are somewhat limited.  I texted Tupac for some advice.  He sent me back some hot lines:

Come on come on
That's just the way it is
Things'll always be the same
That's just the way it is
aww yeah

Is the public financing system broken Barack?  Or are you as greedy as the CEO's you criticize?  As for you McCain - Phil Gramm as an economic advisor in this day and age is like letting the inmates run the asylum! (Yes I know he is no longer affiliated with the campaign and he slated for the Belarus embassy).

Edit: Poor AIG... looks like the feds won't bail them out either.  I guess they should have investigated what they insured in the financial sector.  Nah, no one does that anymore... :)

Edit: That's what?  The fifth time I have used the inmates run the asylum expression during the last couple weeks.  Seems like it always applies.